Dan Delmar: Quebec Liberals hope fright factor will scare up one more mandate

Quebec Liberals hope fright factor will scare up one more mandate

Jean Charest may face the toughest battle of his political career this month. He won’t be running for a fourth term as Quebec premier on his accomplishments over the past decade because, quite frankly, there isn’t a whole lot to brag about. He will instead try to exploit the weaknesses of his opponents and, fortunately for him, they are plentiful.

In 2003, Charest was elected as a reformer. He planned to “re-engineer” Quebec; to slash the mammoth government bureaucracy that has been weighing this province and its citizens down. Nearly one decade later, the debt has reached $250-billion and fat has only been trimmed through attrition.

Charest inspires few. He has instead been seen as the lesser of between three and five evils; a Progressive Conservative who immediately made the jump to the provincial Liberals without batting an ideological eyelash. If you ask ten Quebecers where Charest sits on the political spectrum, you will get ten different answers: Anywhere from a big-government liberal to a neo-conservative to a fascist.

Fortunately for Liberals, he is a phenomenal campaigner and, despite never-ending protest and scandal, is still viewed by many as the favourite to win the Sept. 4 election – although he may form a minority government.

The key to his success won’t be to accentuate the positive, but to focus on the scary prospect of the other contenders leading Quebec. Trailing him closely in the polls is Parti Québécois (PQ) leader Pauline Marois, who will try her best to downplay her sovereigntist fantasies, knowing that Quebecers have little appetite for a unity debate. The PQ has already committed one major gaffe in this regard. Bernard Drainville, their spokesperson on intergovernmental affairs, admitted that his possible future dealings with the federal government would be tantamount to a childish game of tug-of-war.

If elected, the PQ would make outlandish constitutional demands. If the federal government meets those demands, Quebec wins and Péquistes are heroes. If they don’t, the PQ wins by plunging the province into another constitutional crisis and paving the way for a third referendum (support for sovereignty was high after failure of the Meech Lake accord).

The Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) is in third place, according to polls, and leader Francois Legault (a former PQ minister and senior MNA for that party until three years ago) is even more ideologically inconsistent and harder to define than Charest. His party’s platform doesn’t include sovereignty, but Legault himself hasn’t ruled out sovereignty as an option for Quebec — albeit not in the next decade. Charest will try to ignore Legault for as long as possible, making the election a two-way race. The prospect of a serious non-sovereigntist challenger could eat away at the Liberals’ support.

When Charest won’t bring out the sovereigntist boogeyman, he’ll be trying to associate Marois with unruly student-protesters. Through much of the “Quebec Spring” conflict, PQ MNAs wore red squares on their lapels in solidarity with students, who opposed a sharp tuition hike. Then Marois began to read the polls and the squares quickly became a fashion faux pas.

Although such sustained protests are exceptional and evidence of a growing discontent with the Liberals, the general public has grown tired of the inconvenience of hundreds – sometimes hundreds of thousands – of students clogging up city streets. Charest will continue to highlight his determination to enforce the rule of law, rather than, as he put it, have the streets dictate government policy.

He’ll have to walk a fine line. The Law and Order card doesn’t work well in a province that considers itself “progressive” and tolerant. But Quebecers are more and more mindful of their massive debt and struggling public institutions. Charest will have to convince voters he was right in trying to find that new revenue from students – half of whom earn less than $12,000 annually.

Charest is calling this election now, 17 months before he needs to, because his handling of the student conflict has boosted his otherwise abysmal approval ratings. With important witnesses to be called in the Charbonneau Commission (investigating corruption linked with the construction industry) in the fall, the premier will only become less popular. It’s now or never. Charest isn’t hanging on to preserve his legacy; he’s just hanging on.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.